It is very obviously blue brindle on the dog's eye patch. Frankly I would say that this is a white dog with a blue brindle patch and extremely heavy ticking. I have seen a couple of white Greyhounds that are that heavily ticked . . . they just look dirty all the time!

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another." -Anatole France

I keep looking at that very first picture and if you look at the ticking over her right eye is looks almost brindle. I wonder if ticking comes from a diluting gene. Man I haven't studied genetics in forever . . .

Last edited by SisMorphine on January 15th, 2007, 11:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another." -Anatole France

Merle is a colour combination in dogsâ€™ coats. It is a solid base color (usually red/brown or black) with lighter blue/gray or reddish patches, which gives a mottled or uneven speckled effect. Although most breeds that can have merle coats also typically have white markings (such as around the neck, under the belly, and so on), and often tan points (typically between the white and the darker parts of the coat), these are separate colors from the merle; some dogs do appear completely merled with no white or tan markings.

Merle is a distinguishing marking of several breeds, particularly the Australian Shepherd, and appears in others such as German Coolies in Australia, the Shetland Sheepdog, various Collies, the Welsh Corgi (Cardigan), the Pyrenean Shepherd, the Catahoula Leopard Dog, the Koolie, the Old English Sheepdog and others.

Merle is actually a heterozygote of an incomplete dominance gene. If two such dogs are mated, on the average one quarter of the puppies will be double merles and some percentage of these double merle puppies could have eye defects and/or could be deaf. Knowledgeable breeders who want to produce merle puppies mate a merle with a nonmerle dog; roughly half the puppies will be merles without the risk of vision or hearing defects.

In January 2006, scientists at Texas A&M University announced the discovery of the mobile genetic unit, a retrotransposon, responsible for the merle mutation in dogs.[1]

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.